Over the past 20 years, Americans have heard that "Washington is spending too much." Whatever politician was railing against Washington spending would come up with some obscure program that is measuring methane gas as pigs past wind. These are almost always conservative politicians pointing out these "problems." For some reason, and I don't understand why, they never mention billions of dollars spent on weapons systems that have never worked or the fact that we are now enjoying the third-generation of stealth fighter/bombers. The third generation. No military in the world has ever been able to detect the first generation or the second generation. Yet, we're spending more money on the third generation and are currently developing a fourth generation. In spite of these spending atrocities (in this case, an atrocity is in the eye of the beholder) the following chart puts our spending and our revenues into perspective.

click on graph to enlarge

This chart clearly shows that our problem is one of revenue. I wonder if we could fix this revenue problem by ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and reversing the Bush tax cuts?

From CBPP:

Just two policies dating from the Bush Administration — tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — accounted for over $500 billion of the deficit in 2009 and will account for almost $7 trillion in deficits in 2009 through 2019, including the associated debt-service costs. [6] (The prescription drug benefit enacted in 2003 accounts for further substantial increases in deficits and debt, which we are unable to quantify due to data limitations.) These impacts easily dwarf the stimulus and financial rescues. Furthermore, unlike those temporary costs, these inherited policies (especially the tax cuts and the drug benefit) do not fade away as the economy recovers (see Figure 1).

Without the economic downturn and the fiscal policies of the previous Administration, the budget would be roughly in balance over the next decade. That would have put the nation on a much sounder footing to address the demographic challenges and the cost pressures in health care that darken the long-run fiscal outlook.[7]